Price loading...

Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies

Themes & Concepts

Price data last checked 106 day(s) ago - refreshing...

View at Amazon

Price History & Forecast

No Price Data Available

Price history will appear here once data is collected from Amazon.

Price Distribution

No price data available for histogram

Description

Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated--particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty--the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the visual ethics at the center of this book, as he advocates for "innocence of the eye," which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within a text or visual object shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. The category of the aberrant draws on ideas from queer and disability studies but makes a case for a broader understanding of strange bodies; in this book, aberrant bodies are those whose visible forms lead to a breakdown in cognition, a breakdown that makes space for the innocent eye to move. In thinking about such bodies, this book introduces the term extranormative to explain the complex and often complicit relationship these figures exemplify in relation to a (surprisingly expansive) Victorian norm. Thinking in terms of extranormativity as an essential feature of Victorian life disrupts tired notions of the period as one in which a narrow definition of bourgeois normativity took hold.

Product Specifications

Format: hardcover
ASIN: 0192888560
Category: Books > Subjects > Arts & Photography > Themes & Concepts
Domain: Amazon UK
Release Date: 28 May 2024
Listed Since: 05 September 2023

Barcode

No barcode data available

Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies

Price History & Forecast

No Price Data Available

Price Distribution

Description

Product Specifications

Barcode

Similar Products You Might Like

The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction

Routledge - The Ethical Vision of George Eliot (Books)

Routledge Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture

The Victorian Mind's Eye: Reading Literature in an Age of Illustration

Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction (Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and Society): 8 ... in Health, Disability, Culture & Society)

The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition

Routledge Literary Bric-a-Brac and the Victorians Book

LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives

Routledge - Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide Book

The Victorian Novel (Blackwell Guides to Criticism)

Victorian Literature: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies)

Art, Race, and Fantastic Color Change in the Victorian Novel (Among the Victorians and Modernists)

Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Routledge Revivals)

The Forms and Fictions of Victorian Art Instruction

Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature

The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Subject, Ecology, Form (Routledge Research in Art History)

Body Aesthetics

Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing, Thinking, Writing (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind

The Optical Unconscious (October Books)

Routledge Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction

Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature)

The Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art (OXFORD HANDBOOKS SERIES)

Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)